Good Girl

A Novel

By: Aria Aber

Length: 10 hrs

Publisher's summary

An electric debut novel about the daughter of Afghan refugees and her year of nightclubs, bad romance, and self-discovery—a portrait of the artist as a young woman set in a Berlin that can't escape its history

A girl can get in almost anywhere, even if she can’t get out.

“A no-bullsh*t, must-read debut.”—Kaveh Akbar

“Kaleidoscopic, full of style and soul.”—Raven Leilani

“Radiant with longing and beauty.”—Sarah Thankham Matthews

In Berlin’s artistic underground, where techno and drugs fill warehouses still pockmarked from the wars of the twentieth century, nineteen-year-old Nila at last finds her tribe. Born in Germany to Afghan parents, raised in public housing graffitied with swastikas, drawn to philosophy, photography, and sex, Nila has spent her adolescence disappointing her family while searching for her voice as a young woman and artist.

Then in the haze of Berlin’s legendary nightlife, Nila meets Marlowe, an American writer whose fading literary celebrity opens her eyes to a life of personal and artistic freedom. But as Nila finds herself pulled further into Marlowe’s controlling orbit, ugly, barely submerged racial tensions begin to roil Germany—and Nila’s family and community. After a year of running from her future, Nila stops to ask herself the most important question: Who does she want to be?

A story of love and family, raves and Kafka, staying up all night and surviving the mistakes of youth, Good Girl is the virtuosic debut novel by a celebrated young poet and, now, a major new voice in fiction.

©2025 Aria Aber (P)2025 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Good Girl dives heart-first into one of the art’s great crises: that the great searing ecstasies of youth should form us before we have the psychospiritual maturity to articulate them. Usually writing this good is realized through a gauzy patina of recollection, but in Good Girl the bass beat is still full in your chest, the coke drip’s still a numbing bitter in your throat. Aber’s ear is so remarkably good you hardly even notice she’s building this great symphony of textures, mosaics within mosaics.”—Kaveh Akbar, New York Times bestselling author of Martyr!

“In Good Girl, pleasure is textured, surprising, and treated with utter seriousness.”—Raven Leilani, New York Times bestselling author of Luster

“A novel of longing and tenderness, a piercing Künstlerroman that understands home as a heartbeat and a heartache, writing into the ache and daily metronome of exile. It’s a love song and a torch song for Berlin—like an ode to a body full of chronic pain, this is me and it also hurts me. I disappeared into the many overlapping and colliding worlds of this book and emerged with a glistening, vibrating, beautifully exhausted heart—newly alive to the complexities of love and family and becoming ourselves. I loved this book.”—Leslie Jamison, New York Times bestselling author of Splinters